As a guy living in Comcast + Motorola country, I was pretty surprised to learn that Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DVRs (running SARA) support external drives. I’m only two years behind in the news, but being able to upgrade a stock cableco box is pretty exciting. I could see myself putting up with an inferior interface for additional low-cost storage…. Another reason TiVo needs to activate that Series3 eSATA port ASAP.
Disclosure: Weaknees is a ZNF advertiser, though they did not turn me on to this story or provide any input.
The requirement for enabling eSATA ports on cable company DVR’s and TiVo’s is different.
You can expand capacity on a TiVo by replacing the internal drive since the TiVo is yours.
On the Cable company DVR, the only way to expand is externally.
With that said, it would be much more consumer friendly (and also provide the ability to significantly increase capacity by adding space internally and externally) to enable the eSATA port on the TiVo S3.
I’ve got the Cox version, which supports eSATA. I was going to pick one up with Chanukah money, but I decided not to, because I’ve never come close to filling up the internal.
help needed with a pvr from cable company that is full and the saved recorded shows are needed off the pvr – scientific atlanta 8300 how do I do this before returning it to the company and by the way I dont like the idea of a cable company turning your machine on or off —–scary feeling I can not make it turn on to work in my home
can you contact me asap thanks